Sony PlayStation has announced the closure of Firewalk Studios, weeks after the launch of its first game Concord. For a fringe of the Internet, this is a victory in the culture war.
The culture war is still ongoing within the video game industry. In the middle of an election year in the United States, part of the far right has decided to use video games as a terrain of confrontation to advance the most reactionary ideas.
At the start of the year, the company Sweet Baby Inc, a consulting company for video game developers, paid the price with a harassment campaign on the Internet.
Since then, the Gamergate movement 2024 version has continued on its merry way. For these players, the announced closure of Firewalk Studios and its 170 employees by Sony PlayStation is a big victory to celebrate.
But the group already has a new game and another publisher in its sights.
What is Gamergate?
Gamergate is the name given to this reactionary movement born on the web in 2014 and which served as a breeding ground for part of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. Like the influence of the far right on forums from jeuxvideo.com in France, it is a network that used video games as a launching point for a cultural battle.
At the time, the question was the place of women in front of and behind the screen of a video game. These people believed that a woman could not play video games outside of Candy Crush or The Sims, and that she could even less participate in the development of a video game.
Today, this question remains, but it has been supplemented by a much easier scarecrow to raise: the question of gender and trans people.
What you need to know about Gamergate 2024
In 2024, Gamergate therefore focuses on the question of gender, an often misunderstood subject which makes it easy to shock crowds at a time when homosexuality is less and less frightening.
This cultural battle involves the fight against the “DEI”, for “ Diversity, equity, and inclusion », an organizational method which must encourage integration and equality, through training and more diverse recruitment. If a player talks to you about “DEI”, that should ring a bell. There is also a visceral fear of personal pronouns: he, they, she, them, iel, iels and their English equivalents.
Gamergate 2024 also involves new methods of rallying. This involves Premium Twitter accounts amplified by the algorithm for their divisive comments and compatible with Elon Musk’s positions.
This also involves YouTube videos, again designed to be favored by the algorithm and bring in money by banking on the rage of players. They all use the same format: a person (usually a white man) explains to you on camera why you should be angry for about ten minutes (enough to get advertising on YouTube). Videos shot in the form of “revelations” that are easy to produce and publish. The channels whose specialty is this publish several per day.
All of these contents have things in common. They believe that journalism represents corruption and danger. They draw links between a perceived decline in the quality of video games by some and games highlighting diversity. Only Asian games with hyper-sexualized characters like Stellar Blades are favored.
Thus, the failure of a game like Concord is for them proof that they are right, putting aside the success of a game like Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian’s RPG also allows you to choose your pronoun and homosexual relationships.
Finally, there is the Discord server network where Gamergate members meet. In these spaces of freedom, far from the moderation of large platforms, they can more easily express their transphobia, but also more basic sexism. A field where they will use generative AI to “correct” the design of characters that are not sufficiently sexualized for their taste.
Dragon Age: the new target
If the announcement of the closure of the Firewalk studio by PlayStation was the big news on Tuesday, October 29, Gamergate 2.0 does not want to be distracted from its new target: the release of the game Dragon Age: The Veilguard by the Bioware studio.
The game achieved great critical success (82 on OpenCritic), and represents a good surprise for the specialized press, after development of the game known to have been chaotic (work began in 2015).
For Gamegate, this game developed in the West brings together everything that needs to be fought in modern video games. They believe that the only possible reason for the game (which they have not yet played) to have obtained good ratings is massive corruption in the specialized press. A game which they see, based on some screenshots, that it will offer to choose its gender and a physical diversity of its characters. A traditional element of Bioware games which already integrated LGBT stories from its first games.
The result of this new campaign is the private passage of a certain number of Bioware developer accounts on social networks, following harassment. Obviously, this primarily affects female developer accounts.
